Kasperian Moving Parts

Mencoder, DVD Rip, Volume Increase, Your PSP, and You!

Monday December 10, 2007

Holy crap. The time between iterations of testing video encoding is prohibitive to quick progress as well as a (several) good night’s sleep. After much pain and gnashing of teeth, I present you with the result of the last 3 hours of my life. time nice mencoder dvd://1 -sws 9 \ -aid 128 -af volume=15:0 \ -vf pullup,softskip,dsize=480:272,scale=0:0,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.7 \ -ofps 24000/1001 \ -oac faac -faacopts br=128:mpeg=4:object=2:raw -channels 2 -srate 48000 \ -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=500:global_header:partitions=all:trellis=1:level_idc=30 \ -of lavf -lavfopts format=psp -info name=”Tomb Raider” -o “$HOME/Movies/TombRaider.mp4” Sincere thanks to forgeflow’s answer to this ubuntu forum post and to his excellent videogeek site. Other observations: There is far more complexity to audio/video encoding than I’d ever want to understand fully. Anyone who Read more…

Linux

Embedded Album Covers, Your PSP, Amarok, and You

Sunday December 9, 2007

So… first off, I Googled for Amarok, hoping to find some new sweet pixels and instead I find this. Um… so not the Amarok that I know and love. Anyway, a couple of years ago, I won a PSP from the LinuxWorld convention. Being that I’m a geek, it was love at first boot jingle. Being that I am married, have 3 kids, work full-time++, and try to hack every once in a while, the brave little PSP spent a lot of alone time. Oh sure, I own several PSP games (go SOCOM2!!), but that’s about it. Until now. Since I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home for a bit, I’m not driving back and forth to Read more…

Life in General

I am a nerd

Thursday December 6, 2007

So, lest there be any confusion about the subject, I’m a nerd. You can blame my wife for making me take the test. And there goes 5 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back…

KPilot

Ah, Now I See What You’re Talking About

Saturday December 1, 2007

It’s an extremely difficult thing, trying to support this weird beast, the Palm. Or, more accurately, it’s an extremely difficult thing trying to support the numerous personalities and implementations of the Palm beast. I mean, KDE PIM as a start is about as unsexy as you could want. But genius me, I focus on the ugliest duckling of KDE PIM: KPilot. Don’t get me wrong… I’m a gadget geek, enjoy Palms immensely, and have been for… gosh… 8+ years now?? (Wow, just had to check what year the IIIe came out…). And, there’s a reason that I’m hacking on KPilot, and that’s because I honestly believe it’s the best PIM-synching Palm solution in FLOSS-land. Anyway, back to my point… The Read more…

Life in General

Better Firefox Themes??

Wednesday November 21, 2007

Okay, seriously, I think we could just delete 90% of the firefox themes on addons.mozilla.org. Truly, I am almost physically ill after spending a few minutes looking through them. And the ones I’ve found on deviantart are out of date and unusable. Surely, there must be a top-secret repository of really good Firefox 2 themes somewhere, right? Certainly this can’t be all that there is? Bah humbug. You know what? I think I’d even consider paying some small amount of $cash for something truly beautiful and groundbreaking.

Life in General

MWM looking for Bling/Compiz/Emerald/KDE3 love

Sunday November 18, 2007

Dear Lazyweb, I would LOVE to have bling on my desktop. I use KDE3, and have been good all year. I think I should be allowed to have bling on my desktop just like all of my GNOME friends. To this end, I’ve tried running compiz with emerald in my KDE desktop. I can get both compiz and emerald running just nicely and get it all configured the way that I like it. But then whenever I restart X and compiz comes back, it manages to forget half of my keybindings and configuration settings. I don’t think I’m doing anything weird or revolutionary in my settings–just an 8-sided cube with viewport-switching keybindings, ring switching, scale niftiness, animations and other standard-looking Read more…

KDE

KDE NetworkManager workaround

Wednesday November 7, 2007

In case anyone else hits this…. In one of the more recent releases of our beloved KDE, code was added to more smoothly integrate with networking. Namely, the attempt is now made to be aware of NetworkManager-initiated network connections, as well as know when NetworkManager doesn’t think it’s connected so as to not keep trying network activities when there might not be a network connection. Excellent idea, honestly. However (you knew there was one), I have a love/hate relationship with NetworkManager and knetworkmanager. When they work, they work great. When they don’t it’s supremely irritating. Case in point: I’m at a friend’s house. He’s using standard WEP and a non-broadcasted ESSID. I tried all manners of asking NetworkManager nicely for Read more…

Life in General

Thinkpad T61 and Iogear 4-port USB KVM Switch

Friday November 2, 2007

This, the next exciting story in my Adventures With the Thinkpad T61 At Work (TM) =;)…. So I got a really sweet-looking IOGEAR 4-port USB KVM Switch at work. But when I plugged it into the T61, although the nVidia driver was able to find the external display (auto-detect button thingey), it only gave me 2 options for resolution, the larger of which was 640×480, which obviously is rubbish. So I stumbled across this helpful ubuntu page which gave me the clue I needed: It would seem that xorg cannot detect the possible resolutions when using the “nvidia” driver. For me, the only resolution I could use was my LCD’s native resolution (1680×1050). Here’s how you fix this: 1) Make Read more…

Life in General

$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart

Thursday November 1, 2007

This is pretty darned cool. I bought a $300 desktop from Walmart a few years ago and it’s still running OpenSUSE and serving as a pretty capable desktop machine for the family. Definitely worthwhile to put our FOSS dollars where our mouths are too, imho. Let’s support the companies who are actively putting the software that we think is best out there! =:) $200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart | Gadget Lab from Wired.com $200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart

Life in General

KPilot Mail Juxtaposition

Thought this was pretty humorous. Went looking for unread KDE mail today and found these 2 e-mails back to back. Does it stink? Is it great? I’m going with the “is great” e-mail, personally… =;)